Le tipologie del comportamento elettorale in Italia

The article reviews the literature on Italian electoral behaviour in the light of the typologies of voting. Preliminarily, it offers a brief overview on the implications of some basic conceptual and methodological choices. Then it is divided into three parts. In the first, the author analyzes the contents and the interpretations of the well-known typology proposed by Parisi and Pasquino, who sub-divide among belonging, opinion and exchange voting. This typology is the only one that has been operationalized with both ecological and survey data. The analysis of the operazionalizations reveals some shortcomings, the majors of which consist of the difficulty in finding the opinion voter through ecological analysis and of the specular difficulty in finding the exchange voting through survey analysis. To overcome these problems, in the following two parts the article reviews the typologies focusing on individual voting behaviour and those focusing on political attitudes. The analysis of these sub-fields suggests to spoil belonging and opinion voting of their normative meaning and to consider them as attitudes that may exist in different degrees. The article also shows that the methodology has a profound impact on the content of the typologies proposed, thus confirming the necessity of conceptualization efforts for improving connotativeness, a step which is confirmed to be logically antecedent to empirical testing.